You can safely bet that when the stupid gubernatorial recall election occurs, and should Kathleen Falk win the Democratic nomination, I will not be voting for her.

Mike Nichols gives more examples of Falk’s work besides the ones I previously listed:

As a public intervenor in the mid-1980s, according to newspaper stories at the time, she opposed the widening of I-94 to three lanes each way between Highways 18 and 16 in Waukesha County. Described by the Milwaukee Journal as “a leading critic,” she reportedly maintained at the time that an air quality permit was necessary for the project to proceed – a stance even the Department of Natural Resources disagreed with.

The paper also reported that she was part of a group that said the widening of the highway would encourage urban sprawl.

When I asked her the other day if it was accurate to call her an opponent in the controversy, she said, “Frankly, I don’t remember it.” After I read her parts of a newspaper story about her involvement, she suggested that her role as an intervenor who worked for a citizens advisory committee was not always one of opposition so much as making sure proper environmental assessments were conducted.

Falk is spreading manure with that assertion.

Nichols repeats a point of mine that requires repetition:

At the same time, she did not dispute opposing two other high-profile projects people might remember.

Falk was one of the loudest critics of a plan to replace a four-lane stretch of Highways 12 and 18 in Dane County — described as one of the most congested and dangerous sections of roadway in the state — with a new six-lane South Beltline that crossed the Upper Mud Lake Marsh.

She very publicly expressed concern about the impact of the Beltline on the 1000-acre marsh in the 1980s, and called a compromise that allowed destruction of 22 acres of marshland and creation of 25 acres of new wetlands a “joke.”

Asked about that controversy the other day, she said she thought more should have been done to protect the wetlands and also said there were better alternatives to improving the old highway than what was selected.

So the blood of the people who died on the South Beltline before it was finally upgraded in the late 1980s is also on the hands of, as David Blaska calls her, The Kathleen. Run on that, Ms. Falk.

Back in the 1980s, one of the other things that was written was that she — first, as an attorney for Environmental Decade and later as an aggressive public intervenor — fought the construction of the Fox River Mall off Highway 41 a couple miles from downtown Appleton.

Most Americans nowadays, even those of us who treasure Wisconsin’s lakes and fields, see highways and malls as inextricably and inevitably linked to the way we drive and shop – the result of choices we make about how and where to live our lives. But back then, there were folks who thought stopping the mall was the way to preserve Appleton’s downtown, and Falk was quoted in 1991 as saying, “We joined with the downtown business people, who had their own set of concerns, many of which duplicated ours.”

It’s fair to say the mall has been “a challenge” to downtown Appleton, she told me the other day. But she declined to tell me whether she thought, in retrospect, it should have been built or not.

So Falk opposed what is now the largest shopping mall outside the Milwaukee area and one of the biggest tourist and retail draws to the Fox Cities. That should get her a lot of Northeast Wisconsin votes.

Nichols concludes with another point that Falk won’t be running on either:

I guess it’s kind of a moot point in a way since she lost all three battles.

Next time you’re shopping in the mall or driving down I-94 or the Beltline, the thing is, imagine if she hadn’t.

Falk can argue that she wanted to reverse our way of life — better transportation and retail opportunities — or she can run on her policy failures before Dane County voters wrongly voted for her twice for county executive. (Not to mention her two statewide election failures.)

The fact that Falk now has primary opponents — state Sen. Kathleen Vinehout (D–Alma) and possibly Secretary of State Douglas La Follette and Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett — demonstrates that Democrats haven’t decided to fall on their candidacy swords to pave the way for her path to the final recall election. That doesn’t show that there’s a dime’s worth of difference among them, but apparently running a Dane County liberal is turning off other Democrats.